Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (47 page)

Steward did some porno-book reviewing, too, after an editor at
The Advocate
who had admired his Phil Andros fiction asked him to consider reviewing various pornographic titles for the newspaper. Steward accommodated him—but grimly, for what had once seemed to him a genre full of revolutionary possibility now clearly belonged to the lowest form of hack. Discussing a novel called
Hard and Hungry
by one F. W. Love, for example, Steward noted with typical vitriol:

Indeed, pulp houses were now spewing forth such abysmally written porn that they were driving away even the least discriminate of one-handed readers. “It seems that as we got more open, with less censorship, that the literary quality has almost entirely disappeared, with only junk being produced,” Steward noted about gay pornographic novels in a late-life interview. In another porno-novel review, he similarly noted that “because of the extraordinary flood of worthless pornies, fewer and fewer traditional novels are being written, and the day is probably not far off when none will be produced at all, succumbing to the unbelievable excrement that Greenleaf, Surrey House, and Blueboy produce daily.”

The dumbing-down of pornography necessarily led Steward to wonder what else he might now write, for in the loneliness of retirement he found he felt happiest and most alive when seated before his typewriter. In 1975, while visiting Santa Monica, he met briefly with Jeanne Barney, a journalist whose politically minded advice column had appeared in
The Advocate
since 1970. She mentioned a new publication she hoped to start, one that would build on Steward’s notion of a literature of erotic experience for the thinking male homosexual. “I told Sam, and anyone else whom I courted for the magazine…that my vision was for an
Evergreen Review
–type publication [called
Drummer
] for the leather/S&M crowd,” she later recalled. She also specifically remembered that “there was indeed considerable contradiction between Sam Steward, the man, and Phil Andros, the writer/character. When I first met Sam, I was quite surprised to encounter the tiny, immaculately groomed gentleman that he was. But I think that it was the sweetness of his stories that made them so well received; there was a kind of nostalgia to them.”

Steward returned to Berkeley interested in Barney’s idea for a new magazine, sharing news of it with James Purdy. But to Barney herself he could make no promises. “I’m not sure whether Phil Andros can produce the heavy SM/leather kind of thing you prefer in
Drummer
.” He did, however, do her the favor of referring her to the erotic leather artist Chuck Arnett after running into him in September 1976. In the end, he would write several stories for
Drummer
(one of them illustrated by Arnett), and at the same time become a sort of father figure for a number of writers and editors at that magazine, including Jack Fritscher, Stephen Saylor, John Preston, and Joseph Bean—all of whom would find their way to his “hidden bungalow” to pay homage to him in the coming decade.

Steward had by now withdrawn from the San Francisco gay scene, where he felt himself an entirely unwelcome older man. While he still hosted a mildly abusive hustler once a week at the bungalow (dutifully recording the event afterward in his sex calendars), he increasingly preferred reverie to reality and solitude to company. Pornographic magazines and photographs helped spur his fantasies; so too, eventually, would the VCR. To improve the physical sensation of his masturbatory experiences, he invested a substantial amount of money in a newly invented mechanical device called the Accu-Jac. Billed by its maker as “the world’s first fully automatic masturbation machine,” the Accu-Jac was the size and shape of a toolbox, featured “complete suction, stroke, speed and dildo depth controls,” and cost a whopping $595. Steward liked the device so much that shortly after purchasing it he initiated a lengthy correspondence with its manufacturer in which he drolly identified himself as a compassionate uncle hoping to provide the best possible sexual relief to his bed-bound quadriplegic nephew. Over the course of the correspondence he suggested many possible improvements to the device, for he was by nature a tinkerer and inventor. But for the most part the device suited his needs very well. Four years into owning it, he would write Witold Pick, “There is a manufactured device called an Accu-jac; I bought one years ago, and now I don’t worry about sex at all.”

•

By the late 1970s Steward had become ever more like his early literary hero, Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, in his desire to withdraw into a lair of decadent isolation. As he approached his seventieth year he was already quite isolated, for he had few friends in Berkeley and no friends at all in his dirty, crime-ridden, low-income neighborhood. Moreover, he could invite only the most understanding visitors into his home, for it was now so fantastically crowded with his papers, books, and erotic objets d’art that there was barely room for a guest to sit down. With age his insomnia had worsened, so his hours were highly irregular: he now read science fiction and fantasy novels late into the night, and slept into the early afternoon. In doing so he became ever more isolated, and ever more reliant upon Seconal and other barbiturates.

He did, however, continue to correspond with old friends, resuming contact in 1976 with Wendell Wilcox, who was now battling both alcoholism and liver cancer, and had recently had a colostomy. Because his wife, Esther, had always been his sole financial support, he had become nearly destitute in the years following her death. At the time Steward began corresponding with him again, he was living in a furnished room, supporting himself as best he could by taking tickets in a Chapel Hill movie theater. When he mentioned to Steward that he had long since given up writing fiction, Steward admitted that his own days of novel-writing had also come to an end: “As for Phil Andros, I think he’s done for; he can no longer think of any fresh ways to describe the tongue sliding around or into or between or over or against.”

•

That August, Steward surprised himself by adopting Fritz, the neglected dachshund of his recently deceased landlady. Steward had slowly befriended Fritz over the years because the little dog had frequently been let out to play in the backyard between the two homes. “I had enjoyed his company for four years [now, and when my landlady died] either I had to take him, or give him away,” Steward later wrote. “For the first few weeks I kept asking all my friends if they didn’t want a dog—and then gradually it all changed. I fell in love, really in love—for the first time in my life.” He described in his memoirs the profundity of this relationship with Fritz, the first dog he had ever owned and the only living creature he had ever really allowed close to him: “It was as if all my life I had been waiting for an object on which to pour out all the accumulated love that I had been storing up for so many years,” he admitted. “At first it was somewhat frightening, and then I succumbed and was his completely.”

Apart from Fritz, Steward’s only other real interest in life now was his Stein-Toklas memoir, which Houghton Mifflin bought on a proposal in 1975 on the condition that Steward publish it in tandem with the many letters Stein and Toklas had written to him. In order for those letters to make sense, Steward needed to annotate them heavily, for they referred frequently to his side of the correspondence, which unfortunately could not be included.
^*
Steward also needed to negotiate permission from both the Stein and Toklas estates to publish the letters, a process that would end up taking over two years and would be filled with unexpected difficulties and frustrations, including persistent silence from Toklas’s executor
^*
and arguments over potential royalties. One of the Stein heirs wanted to claim 30 percent of all revenues generated by the book, and also to receive a coauthorship credit. “I am hoping (almost against hope) that Michael [Stein] will [reconsider],” Steward wrote his old friend Max White; “if not I’ll give him his goddamned 30%, since 30% of zero is zero anyway.”
^*

•

Steward’s immersion in the world of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas during the mid-1970s was fascinating to some of his friends but irritating to others, particularly his friends in the San Francisco leather community. Jack Fritscher, the Catholic-seminarian-turned-leatherman who edited
Drummer
magazine, bemusedly recalled Steward’s “insistence on his zero degrees of separation from Gertrude and Alice [which] became his claim to fame when perhaps he thought his own notoriety and reputation was not meal ticket enough.” Fritscher went on to suggest that Steward’s immersion in the Stein-Toklas memoir was symptomatic of his profound alienation from the new, youth-oriented, post-Stonewall gay culture:

To others in the new San Francisco leather community, Steward seemed merely pathetic. Guy Baldwin, a Los Angeles–based leatherman and psychotherapist, later specifically recalled Steward’s addiction problems, noting,

To be fair, Steward’s overuse of medication—for he was now supplementing his street purchases of Seconal with a substantial prescription for it from his doctor, ostensibly to help him combat his chronic insomnia—was not altogether different from similar dependencies that many older people develop after retirement, particularly when living alone and struggling with depression. Likewise, Steward’s choice of withdrawing into his bungalow was in many ways quite reasonable, for by the mid-1970s his neighborhood had become exceptionally dangerous, particularly for an elderly man without ready access to automobile transport. The drug-dealing hippie commune two doors down from Steward had brought attack dogs and gunfire to Ninth Street; there was also a brisk sex trade taking place at Ninth and University Avenue, with “hungry males buzzing like flies around a honeypot all evening long,” as Steward wrote Danny Schmidt. “In the morning we kick used condoms off the sidewalk on all four corners of the intersection.” The violent crime created by so much prostitution and drug-dealing led Steward, as he wrote James Purdy, to “(anonymously) writ[e] letters about the hookers on University Avenue [to] the Brk Gazoote
^*
[which] is using my information [for] a six-part series on ‘Sex for Sale in Berkeley.’ How we change. The only reason I disapprove of the hookers is probably because I’m jealous of their success with the Hot & Horny ones.” To combat the disintegration of the neighborhood, Steward actually founded and led a community watchdog group named ZORRO, which undertook photographic surveillance of streetwalkers, their clients, and other potential sources of crime and vandalism.

By spring of 1977, the Stein-Toklas memoir was finally nearing publication. Since the book would be his first “legitimate” publication since his 1936 novel
Angels on the Bough
, Steward rightly worried that his Phil Sparrow and Phil Andros identities might well compromise his book’s critical reception. When a series of photographs of Steward working as Phil Sparrow were featured in a museum exhibition just two months before the memoir appeared, Steward wrote to his sister, “I was interviewed and photographed [for the newspaper] yesterday (as Phil Sparrow, tat-toodler) for an exhibit on [tattooing] at the Oakland Museum
^*
…Impossible to compartmentalize any more, so there was talk about the [Stein-Toklas] book.”

Steward’s self-consciousness about the upcoming publication was further amplified by the memoir’s title. While he had originally named the book
A Love Letter to Gertrude and Alice
, his editor had thought the title “too full of girlish rapture” and in turn suggested Stein’s usual salutation in the letters: “Dear Sammy.” Steward was horrified, for Stein’s infantilizing nickname for him had always been intended for private use only. He appealed to Christopher Isherwood for help, and together they counter-proposed
They Mentioned Everything
, a title drawn from Stein’s
A Long Gay Book
. But to no avail; Steward’s editor at Houghton Mifflin stood firm. Feeling he had no choice in the matter, Steward bitterly wrote to a friend, “Many may take it for a biography of Sammy Davis, Jr.”